The Project
After two decades in the schooling system, there is one thing Iím certain of when it comes to education: I learn best when I want to learn. The trick, as my teachers and professors have discovered, is finding ways to engage me. Whenever a project encourages creativity and motivates me to look up information on my own, I consistently walk away with a smile on my face and a lesson in my brain. Background In particular, there is one project which stands above all others in both fun and purpose. In sixth grade, my teacher challenged the class to create our own country, complete with a map, economy, history, and national anthem. She provided us with a list of the different elements we needed to create, ranging from our imports and exports, booming and struggling industries, and major social issues affecting our country. We were allowed to choose the way we presented our country to the class, so my partner and I chose to create a tourism video which showcased our country as a hot vacation location. I can trace my love of video production directly to that project. During my 8th grade year I returned to the country, using it as a creative constraint to design a fictional military, which I then modeled in 3D using the Maya PLE, a free software offering from Alias. I supplemented that with a stop motion animation detailing a fictional war fought between another falsified country, all the while working with the original history/economy/social structures that I first created in 6th grade. Today, Iím about to graduate with a Bachelorís degree in Design focusing on digital media. 3D modeling is still a huge part of the work I do and is a fundamental outlet of my expression. The techniques I used in middle school to create a country, and consequentially explore it with 3D modeling, fall into the category of world building. World building is a phrase thrown around in the creative industry, but has no standardized definition or explanation. Instead, it is a loose term to describe the expansion of a story, be it visual, written, or played out. World building helps the individual elements of a project maintain consistency within themselves, almost to be thought of as the dressing on a salad: the over layer which helps bring all the components into harmony. Educational Application World building is my response to the increasing difficulty of catering to diversifying interests and learning styles in present day education. In recent years, classrooms across the United States have seen increases in the number of neurodiverse students12 who-- parents and educators say-- are not getting the specialized learning they need.34 My project explores world building as an active learning method aimed at giving teachers a simple-to-use method to work around multiple interests and learning styles at once, all while still controlling the educational material consumed by students. To achieve this goal, I first built a complex world of my own. I recorded my progress, strategies, and discoveries to be used as reference material for practical classroom application. A 2007 report from Indiana Universityís High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) states that about 67% of students surveyed dislike the material presented to them in class, and experience inadequate student-teacher interactions.5 That report was updated in 2009 to include the statistics on how many children would welcome the chance for more creativity in the classroom. The study showed 82% of the 400,000 surveyed asking for more creative opportunities in school.5 I wanted my project to offer students and teachers a new way to work together, and open up opportunities for unique and exciting learning opportunities. There are two primary components to my thesis: a concept and an application. The concept is to use world building to supplement the education of several different subjects. For the application component, I used world building as a means to teaching technological fluency to students aged 11-13 years old at a local charter school. The school, Centre Learning Community (CLC), states their mission is ìto create a powerful, safe, secure, active, project-based learning environment in which students develop the necessary knowledge, skills, and attributes to lead fulfilled and successful lives.î6 I taught a 3D modeling class at their after-school program where student participation was completely voluntary. No grades were assigned during the class and the students work was self-motivated. My work was guided by one of the CLC teachers, Brian Rowan, with whom Iíve been working to design the project ideas to maintain educational relevance. After teaching the class, I recorded the data, and compiled further project ideas for Brian to use in an eight week long course next fall, targeted at educating the students about space technology, presentation design, and social studies. The experience I gained from teaching the students 3D modeling will be extrapolated, with Brianís supervision, to fit a longer and more traditional lesson plan with the goal of engaging students on a personal level of interest. Research-Based Narrative Put simply, a research-based narrative is an informed story. When author Neil Gaiman was writing his novel American Gods, he used dozens of books on folklore and mythology to build his knowledge base.7 This wide range of knowledge gave him a pool of information to explore within his own mind. Instead of trying to pull the details of a story from nowhere, Gaiman allowed all the information he had compiled to bounce off of itself and send him in new directions previously unthinkable. 7 8 In this way, he crafted the narrative in American Gods not only on his own creativity, but also on a solid foundation of research. This concept of intersecting ideas is touched on in Steven Johnsonís Where Good Ideas Come From, a book focusing on the natural history of innovation and creativity. In his book, Johnson discusses an experiment conducted by Robert Thatcher on brain activity as it relates to intelligence: "Thatcherís study suggests a counter-intuitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are. ... Science does not yet have a solid explanation for the brainís chaos states, but Thatcher and other researchers believe that the electric noise of the chaos mode allows the brain to experiment with new links between neurons that would otherwise fail to connect in a more orderly setting." This notion, that the brain is more creative when making random connections, is backed up by Gaiman when he discusses his bibliography for American Gods, saying, ìmy research composts down into something fertile and useful and out of which a story will grow.î 7 Using a research-based narrative for teaching purposes allows students to explore their own curiosities, while creating a suitable environment for teachers to mold those curiosities into an effective and engaging educational experience. Worlds and Levels of Reality A world, or universe, is a collage of information representing a reality. Examples of worlds which have already been created are JRR Tolkein's Middle Earth, George Lucas' Star Wars: Expanded Universe, and JK Rowling's wizarding world of Harry Potter. For the purposes of the Mecropolis Project, I am choosing to have a world represented by a map of any scope, a constrained timeline, and a list of events and realities which take place on the map during the specified timeline. I've approached world building by dividing the related content into three levels of "reality". The first is our reality: real world events, patterns, tendencies-- anything. This is where Seeds come from. The second level is called the Psuedo-reality: the reality of what is going on within that world. The third level is where the story exists. This level introduces the concept of the protagonist, antagonist, drama and resolution. These three levels all feed into research based narratives, allowing the world to form out of a cohesive and dynamic network of information. Experiences The keystone of my thesis is using world building techniques as a method to designing educational experiences. Due to the nature of the US educational system, and the time constraints of the IDS thesis process, it was impractical to arrange a full course using world building techniques to be taught before I graduate. As a result, I opted to teach an after school class at Centre Learning Community (CLC) charter school, a State College Area School District middle school teaching 5th through 8th grade. By teaching the course myself I saw my techniques in action, and I was able to test the exercises I had created. Having the classes after school allowed student participation to be completely voluntary, and for grades to be a non-factor. The software we learned, Autodesk Maya, is a program free to download for students. I have a deep level of experience with 3D modeling, especially Maya, and I have been 3D modeling since the middle school age. I consider 3D modeling a fun and unique activity, combining technical skills and artistic expression. Using world building as a framework for the class, I observed how effective the techniques and exercises I used were at furthering both interest and skill in the field of 3D modeling. Brian Rowan, my CLC advisor and faculty attendant during the classes, considered the class a success, remarking the kids were ìeating it up.î Additionally, there were several other applications I found for world building techniques in the past two semesters. After I finished teaching my class at CLC, one of the teachers approached me asking for help in creating a project for one of their seventh graders, who was also in my class. The student, who Iím simply going to refer to as Student, was motivated by technology and coding, but was said to have trouble finding a direction to take his enthusiasm in. I tasked Student with creating a world of his own, and provided him with the exercises needed to flesh it out. This encouraged personal research into the details of his new world, enabling an academic pursuit which has become entirely self-motivated. I was also able to utilize world building in a couple of my college classes, applying the techniques to a 3D Compositing project and an Environmental Sciences course. For the compositing project, I used world building to design a story to be told via 3D modeling and animation. For the science course, I used world building to illustrate an idea I had to address the problem of urban sprawl. The class was structured around some of the principles I learned while doing research as a TA for Art 314, Penn Stateís introduction to 3D modeling and animation class. 314, taught by the fabulous Michael Collins, was taught as more of an art class than a technical class, focusing on conceptual development and creative expression. I liked that Michael focused on 3D modeling as a means to achieving art, since focusing on the raw instruction of Maya can be daunting over short periods of time. A short period of time is exactly what I had. The class was taught over the course of three weeks, meeting Wednesday and Friday afternoons for 90 minutes each time. While the attendance varied, an average of 10 students were present for each class. My primary goal for the class, acknowledging the problems laid out in my introduction, was to give students a chance to be creative in a classroom. Specifically, I laid out the class to cultivate an interest in 3D modeling, enable students to further their technical fluency, and to provide an introduction to visual storytelling. These three goals play off of each other, and provide a toolkit for the students to use in future projects and exercises which are assigned outside of a building-based curriculum. I also felt these goals synergized well with a grade-less environment, but still offered me a way to evaluate whether or not the different exercises and techniques were effective. Because I have coached figure skating for the past 5 years, I know from experience that a studentís attention span is one of the largest obstacles between a lesson being taught and a lesson being learned. By focusing on creative exercises, I could tell how involved the students were with their work by making a note of which points I had to repeat, how in-depth their questions were, and the quality of the work they produced. This evaluation was important, because the lessons I learned from teaching 3D modeling are going to be passed on to Brian for the course he is designing next fall. The class started out with everyone installing Maya on their computer. Using class time wisely was a priority, so I took the opportunity to show the students several different examples of 3D animation, motion graphics, and the applications of 3D design. Before the class had begun, I prepared some images I thought of as interesting seeds. I gathered these seeds mostly from the popular website Reddit.com. The content on Reddit is incredibly diverse, ranging anywhere from current news to game design tips and techniques. For the purposes of the class, I selected several different seeds which were good for visual storytelling. These were exclusively images, as I did not want to assign the students reading or research which would take up precious class time. After the students saw a couple examples of artwork, I engaged them in the following exercise: Not everyone had installed Maya by the first class, so we spent quite a bit of time with Tell Me A Story. Patterns started to emerge in the stories they would tell. The students, comprised entirely of boys, would often insert violence or war into a scene where it was unwarranted, or at least unexpected. I also found that they became easily distracted if someone started telling a purposefully funny story, and the comments would cascade into further and further ridiculousness. However, this gave me an opportunity to establish a sort of baseline for the class interest: violence and adventure and excitement were where they were comfortable. As a result, I was able to guide the rest of my exercises around this baseline so I could push their comfort zones while simultaneously ensuring that I maintained relevance within their attention span. The next class was spent in Maya. I opened up with a quick round of Tell Me A Story to get their creative juices flowing, and then we dove into Maya. The first thing I started teaching them was how to navigate in 3D space. I took this opportunity to explain to them why a three-button mouse was important for productivity. They asked questions about why a trackpad or two button mouse was not sufficient, so I took the class on a tangent about workflow management and the importance of efficiency when working with computer software. Finally, so the students could produce their own images, I showed them how to do a very quick and rough product render. This was very deliberate, as I felt rendering was a crucial step in the process of cultivating interest in 3D modeling. Being able to render work allows an artist to see the results of their efforts. Even though 3D rendering is considered an advanced activity, I felt being able to produce a ìfinal imageî was important for the students to become engaged in their work. Observations: Installing the software was, by far, the worst part of week 1. With the studentsí computers requiring administrative approval, Brian had to go through each one and install manually. I see this as a potential roadblock for the proliferation of 3D modeling as a casual interest in the school environment. On a different subject, the studentsí obsession with violence really interested me. With my background in sociology, I canít help but wonder if that curiosity comes from the media they consume, or if a fascination with guns and killer robots is almost inherent in pre-teen boys (including myself). One thing I found really interesting was one studentís render of a spaceship. He came up to me, with a very excited tone, and started explaining to me that his spaceship was from the Star Wars universe, and he went over the details of how this particular ship fit into the constraints of that world. This was completely unprompted by me, but I feel it was an affirmation to the power world building holds as a motivational tool. Week 2 started off with workflow management. Specifically, I taught the students how to change their hotkeys and add items to a custom shelf. I showed them a workflow I like to use by hotkeying three specific tools-- extrude face, insert edge loop, and cut faces-- and adding geometry to cubes as to quickly build out 3D ideas. Once I saw them getting a grasp on these basic tools, I introduced the concept of research-based narratives. I explained to them that, as they model, they should try telling themselves a story about whatever they are modeling. From that story, I told them to ask questions to themselves, similar to the Tell Me A Story exercise we warmed up with every class. What does a certain part in a spaceship do? Why is that building purple? Could this thing even fly? The students were encouraged to answer those questions as accurately as possible. While they had fun with asking the questions, they did not seem to show as much motivation towards actually researching the science or history behind their own questions. Instead, they seemed intent on staying in Maya and asking more questions about the technical aspect of modeling. In order to further engage the students, Wednesdayís class ended with a world building exercise. Fridayís class was spent going over the worlds the students had built. I challenged their worldsí validity, and tried to make their simple ideas more complex. What the world building activity let me do was find a curve of interest I could steer into, and then provide them with specific material for them to research. It was this point where I noticed the students starting to understand the idea behind research based narratives. What became truly fascinating was the discussion that followed. The students would propose some quirk about their world, and I would use the knowledge-base I had to give them more material related to that quirk. For instance, one student said in his world everyone had computer chips in their brains so they could communicate with each other. I told the student to look up Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in the UK. I did a project on Warwick in high school, and I remembered that he did work involving computer chips being integrated into human bodies. I brought this up to the student, and suddenly the entire class wanted to know more about him. This was the natural pull of curiosity. What started off as a creative writing exercise turned into a conversation about what cybernetics is and the philosophical implications of its research. These organic tangents happened a lot during class, and I learned to embrace them. Observations: The world building exercise definitely did not come out as I had hoped. The students took a lot of shortcuts with their answers and had trouble understanding the concept. However, I think this is because I gave it to them as homework instead of class work. I feel this exercise requires teacher supervision, and maybe established ì1î answers. They definitely need at least one half of an hour designated to fill out the entire sheet On the topic of organic distractions, it was fascinating to see those tangents leading to something positive. I had great success in sparking the interest in a wide variety of topics by allowing my own mind to wonder. In my History of Digital Art class that I am taking this semester, we have been talking about territorialization, deterritorialization, and re-territorialization. These were terms created by Gilles Deleuze to talk about the re-appropriation of social identities, be they land or ideas.1 Thinking in terms of territory, or the ìidentityî of the class, I let the students deterritorialize the class as a means to learn 3D modeling, if only briefly. With the questions and tangents they led me on, I discovered they re-territorialized the direction of the class to cover material they wanted to learn. Their initial distraction became the content I fed to them, which in turn led to other distractions, and the cycle continued. When I felt it necessary, I brought the class back to 3D modeling and it seemed as though they had a new lease on their attention spans. I found myself returning to this strategy whenever I felt their focus slipping. The tangents, as I started to call them, became a routine we embarked on about every 20 minutes, and would typically last no more than five minutes. Some of my favorite moments from teaching came from these tangents, and I feel they were an important factor in my ability to connect with the students. The final week I focused on walking them through the final project, which was to use a model I had already built as a platform for their own creations. The model I gave them was of the city section in Novakotia where the Capitol Buildings and Grand Chancellorís Palace resides. I told the students they could model anything to put inside of the model as long as they provided one visual reference and one informational reference. This constraint proved to be too open, and some of the less self-motivated students did not complete their work. I noticed these students had trouble organizing their creative research, so I have reworked the project guidelines to better fit a middle school classroom. During the work time Wednesday I explained a couple more advanced techniques, including how to duplicate items while transforming them. The example I used, creating a jet engine, allowed me to show the students how to move origin points within different objects, and how to duplicate objects around a central pivot. In addition to this, I followed the class on a tangent about how jet engines work. Before the last class that Friday, one student emailed me with render of a fantastic model of a Sci-Fi vehicle, claiming it was a spaceship he designed for the final project. However, the design of the ship was so impressive, I became suspicious. I posted the renders to my Facebook wall, and sure enough, one of my friends commented how much the model resembled a vehicle from the Final Fantasy franchise. When I pulled up the renders the next day in class, I asked the student if he had designed the ship himself. At first he said yes, and I made the question more specific, asking him whether or not the work was completely original. He stuttered, and couldnít quite form a clear answer. Finally he said no, and that he just modeled the ship, using an image he found on Google Image Search as a reference. I assured the student that he was not at all in trouble, and proceeded to have a discussion with the class on copyright laws and plagiarism. The rest of Fridayís class was spent with the students showing off the work they had created, and asking any lingering questions. Some students came up to me, eager to share the modifications they had made to their worlds from the building exercise the week before. Even though I had not asked them to keep working on it, I was very excited to see that they had not stopped thinking about the worlds they made. I ended the class with a fun exercise involving Ableton Live and a Launchpad aimed at cultivating further interest in digital media and cross-disciplinary creativity. The students had fun taking turns goofing around in a project I had created, and it gave me a little more one-on-one time with anyone who still had questions. Observations: One student asked me why his turbine did not look real. He showed me the shell of a jet engine, but his turbine was just three blocks rotated around their natural center. I explained to him that what he had made was a representation of a jet engine, not an actual depiction of a jet engine. His head tilted, and I asked him to look up a picture of a jet engine on google. After finding a good image of a turbine, I asked him the difference. After some deliberation, he said proudly that there were more fans on the real turbine than on his. I asked him if he thought the turbine would work with just six fan blades, and he said no. Again, I asked him why, and he explained to me that the plane would not be able to ìmove enough airî with just six fan blades. He seemed very excited by this revelation, and when he came back that Friday, he had a pretty decent looking jet engine attached to an airplane, seats in the airplane, an airport with control tower, computers in the airport, and a water cooler for the pilots to sip out of. While discussing what students could put into the Capitol scene, the class took off on a particularly memorable tangent. One student asked if he could put a tank into the scene, and when I asked him why a tank would be in the scene, he proposed aliens invading. I asked a couple other students why they thought a tank could be in the scene, and all of the responses were along the same lines: the tank was fighting bad guys. Seeing an opportunity for a history lesson, I pulled up the iconic photograph of Tiananmen Square, where a Chinese citizen is standing with his bags of groceries, blocking an entire tank column from advancing. Without even being told to close their laptops, suddenly all the students were looking at the screen in awe. I explained to them that this was the Chinese government using tanks to intimidate its own people, and that sometimes there is not a good side and bad side. This moment definitely sparked some interest, and they started asking questions about the circumstances at Tiananmen Square which I did not have the knowledge to answer. Instead, I told them to do research on their own. As I was walking around during the work time, one student had the related Wikipedia article pulled up behind Maya. I had a fantastic time teaching at CLC. I found that, by actually being in the position of the teacher, I gained a clearer understanding of how to cater towards a class of individuals. This newfound experience lead to the revision of the projects I had already designed, and the creation of some new ones. By the end of the class, I had stories and videos and dozens of new ideas on how to use world building as an educational tool. In a sense, this spread of ideas acted similarly to world building seeds, and I was able to pick and choose which ideas to develop further into full-fledged projects. Overall, I felt the primary goals of my class were reached. The students displayed a genuine curiosity in 3D modeling, as evidenced by the students displaying a noted alarm when I informed them that the April 6th class was the last one I would be teaching. In fact, even after the classes officially ended, I still received emails from several of the students asking for advice and showing off their work. In addition to the students who keep sending me their work, Iím also designing a project for one of the students to complete by the end of the 2013-14 school year. All students at CLC partake in an end-of-the-year independent project where they may choose the subject matter, and then present the work they have done. Brianís co-teacher, Siobhan Donnelly, approached me about designing one studentís seventh grade project. The student, to whom Iíll be referring to as Student, was apparently stuck for an idea. Student had been in my 3D modeling class, and showed a great interest in 3D modeling and animation. I decided this was another fun opportunity to test out world building as an educational tool. I approached Student and asked him if heíd be interested in using world building for his project. He seemed excited about the idea, so I tasked him with creating an interesting society to share with me. Once again, this first step was to see where his natural interest drew him so I could better develop a project for him. He came back to me with the idea of a futuristic society who live in castles and have medieval-era weaponry. I guessed this was inspired by the ìThorî film character franchise from Marvel. My first question to him was why a futuristic society still used medieval weaponry. His answer was ìTradition,î but I thought he could do better. However, I did like the idea of the collision between old-world aesthetic and advanced technology-- I just needed to find a good way to incorporate the two without seeming ridiculous. Why would a society capable of producing lasers and spaceships want to still build castles and use swords? To further constrain myself, I briefly went back into the world of Mecropolis. How could I incorporate ancient cultures into a Sci-Fi environment? I played around with the ideas of culture emulation, with a society simply choosing to behave like knights and kings and such, but that seemed disingenuous. Instead, I opted for some sort of unexplained event (much like the existence of the hulks in Mecropolis) which brought thousands of people from ancient history into the present moment on the Mecropolis. However, it seemed silly to just have one group of people from one particular time period simply show up out of nowhere. Instead, I decided this event brought tens of thousands of people from across history into the future. To deal with this massive influx of people, the governments of Mecropolis decided to gift each distinct group their own area of land on the Mecropolis to call home. It was also decided that each culture should be given complete autonomy as to study how they conduct themselves. Time traveling still seemed far-fetched, even for a world where humans slammed together magical space rocks to create their own planet, so I decided this was the plot of a TV show popular on the Mecropolis. The TV show prompt also gives the students a little more flexibility, and means it does not need to be fundamentally attached to the world of Mecropolis to function. Project Idea: From Time to Time This project is designed to be used for a variable number of students. It can either be a self-motivated independent project, or a more teacher-controlled class wide project. Have students pick one era of human history, constrained by the teacherís preference, to present as a group who have randomly travelled into the far future. Using the technology constraints established in the Mecropolis, or a custom set of technology constraints, have the students do a creative exercise in adapting their chosen society to the future. The project is broken into two parts: First half: Research The Culture Students must research the fundamental facets of their chosen culture. In order to provide an outline for research, I have provided a question bank below. Teachers may pick and choose which questions fit their educational goals, or they may create their own. Here are some example questions: 1) What system of government was in place for your chosen society? 2) What kind of economy drove your chosen society? 3) Who were some famous artists of your chosen society? 4) What was the most advanced technology of your chosen society? 5) What were some social conflicts of your chosen society? 6) What marked the beginning of the society? What marked the end? 7) What was the clothing style of the society? Did it differ between social classes? 8) What were some imports and exports of the society? What were they good at making? What did they have to buy? 9) What kind of buildings did the society like to construct? Churches? Castles? Roads or railways? 10) What kind of religion or spirituality did the society follow? Were there multiple groups? Once students have researched enough to substantially answer the chosen questions, the second half of the project can begin. Second Half: Building In this section, students use their newfound knowledge base of an ancient civilization to build a fictional futuristic society. This society will be based on the prompt that a group of their ancient society was mysteriously transported to the future. However, they are not allowed to just have all of the futuristic technology. Instead, the teacher acts in the role of the ìsupreme governorî of the wherever the societies were transported to, and may only allow the cultures to have certain technologies. Lmiting the influx of futuristic tech, and justifying that limit within the story, safeguards the students from being overwhelmed or distracted by laser guns and spaceships right off the bat. As a method to manage the use of tech, the teacher may make a class wide decree claiming the students now have access to X technology. Alternatively, the teacher may hand out different technologies to different students, further individualizing the learning experience and diversifying the projects on a whole. To make this process easier, it is important to have a bank of different technologies the teacher can distribute at will. Technology Bank: Teachers can either use the technology bank included in this book on Page 27, or they can create their own. Technology banks can either be completely ficticious, as the bank from Mecropolis is, or they can be based on a period of human history. Final Presentation: Students must create three images and write three stories related to those images for their final presentation. The images can be used in a keynote presentation, while the stories will serve to help the students organize what information to present about their society. The final presentation should be organized by the two halves of the project, with students sharing their discoveries about ancient cultures with other students. Then, the students will share their own society. If the student is having trouble understanding how to present their society, the teacher may use their stories to ask the student questions which must be answered in the final keynote. Personal Projects - Art and Science The other application for world building I found was in my college courses. I used world building on two different accounts: once in an art studio, and one in a gen-ed science class. The art class, a 3D compositing course dealing with 3D modeling and compositing techniques in Adobe After Effects, assigned a project where we had to represent the idea of a journey through a 15-30 second 3D animation. I felt ìjourneyî was a broad topic, so I used Mecropolis as a creative constraint. I took ìJourneyî literally, and made my main character a girl who was travelling through one of one of the ëCropís wastelands, trying to find entrance into a walled off city. The design of the environment and architecture of the city took cues from the stories of the world. This enabled me to spend less time developing a visual aesthetic, and more time developing the story of the character and connecting the audience to the idea of a journey. Admittedly, I did not finish the project with as many shots as the storyboard originally dictated. My professor, however, observed that my work still conveyed the idea of a journey, and felt the project had an observable depth to it. The other class I applied world building to, BiSci 003, was an environmental sciences course. The course is laid out to give students an open ended approach to homework assignments, with journaling and reflections due every two weeks. Our final project was called an Ecological Identity project, meant to convey the environmental ìidentityî BiSci 003 had given us. The instructions included prompted us ìto discover and express our ecological identity through an artistic creation using film, drawing, sculpture, music, dance, or a combination of these or any other media.î The only constraint was an outright ban of any type of collage. I found this constraint broad and very unhelpful. Naturally, I concluded this was the perfect opportunity to apply world building to a non-art related course. First I had to discover what my ecological identity had become. The class presented many different human conditions as problems for the environment, and as a result, humanity itself. A subject I found particularly troublesome was urban sprawl, the act of building residential homes with large yards far away from the hustle and bustle of a metropolitan area. Urban sprawl is a problem because people in suburbs are far away from their places of employment, shopping, and education. As a result, suburbanites must use their cars to reach those places, using up valuable resources and hindering the development of a local economy. I found this idea conflicting because I enjoyed growing up in a suburban-esque neighborhood, with a yard and neighbors and interesting places to play. Having a home with a yard and parks to play in is a very pleasant childhood, but itís also very costly on the environment. I thought to myself, ìhow would the suburb exist on the Mecropolis?î Then I invented Stacks. A Stack in Mecropolis is a style of architecture used on both the Earth and the Mecropolis as a mass-housing unit. Stacks are partially inspired by the Blocks from 2012ís Dredd, and partially inspired Terrace Farming which line Japanese and Chinese mountains. The buildings are constructed to be huge, often pyramid-like structures with segmented ìstepsî progressively getting higher and higher. On top of these steps are green roofs meant to emulate land plots, and are zoned similarly to how our modern-day suburbs are. A family may purchase a house and associated land plot for sale, and that plot becomes theirs to own. Inside of the stack, there is space for offices, street vendors, grocery stores, and cheaper housing options. Each stack, before it is built, raises 50% of its building costs through investors who plan on using the stack, be it a family who wants a completely blank plot of land to build their own home, or a company who plans on using the office spaces. These investors can get varying amounts of input on the design of the stack, depending on how large their investment is. This means that not all stacks look alike, and some are even considered architectural masterpieces, much in the same way we treat skyscrapers in todayís world. Stacks are advantageous because the create closer communities of residents and businesses, meaning less need for energy-using personal transport. More stores would be within walking distance from residential areas, and the compact space would generate an economic area friendly to small business owners. Most importantly, the number of people and businesses within a certain area could be maximized. An entire suburban neighborhood, plus the infrastructure to support that lifestyle, plus low-cost housing options, could all be fit into the space of several city blocks. Resources like water and electricity could be optimized for greater efficiency of delivery, and the recycling/waste handling could undergo a similar treatment. I came to this idea after hearing about the issues and statistics raised in BiSci 003, as well as personal research into urban life and the function of cities. Two books, Urban Code by Anne Mikoleit and Moritz Purckhauer; and Cities, Design, & Evolution ''by Stephen Marshall influenced and informed my idea behind the Stacks. ''Urban Code is a fantastic little book full of 100 anecdotes taken from an observational study of the SoHo neighborhood in New York City, New York. The book has simple lessons such as ìPeople walk in the sunshineî and ìEach building houses a business.î Each lesson comes with a small sketch or photo of the concept being discussed, as well as a brief written description.2 Cities, Design, & Evolution delves into the development that cities, as a social construct, have undergone over the course of human history. This book I skimmed much more than Urban Code, but there were several nuggets of information which stuck with me, and I feel these ultimately helped inform my idea of the stacks. For instance, the book observes that ìThe form and internal structure of buildings will tend to reflect their social organization.î3 Marshall then delves into how the divisions within a building or structure determine the societal function of that space. I found this interesting, and tried to incorporate the concept of organic social formations into my idea. I feel that Stacks are a viable philosophy in todayís world, but as I have no background in architectural or civil engineering, I have no means to create an ìofficialî proposal for such a structure. Instead, I used world building as a medium to communicate a concept, and backed that concept with a research based narrative. The end result is an easily communicated idea, meant to spread casually rather than officially. The Story The story I'm focussing on revolves around a country on Mecropolis called Novacotia. The story will span over four different eras in the country’s history, each era representing a standard of living and social perspective. It starts out as being a major political power on the mecropolis, and then they discover super cheap energy and become more reclusive. After a violent military coup (and an outbreak of war across the region in general), the country becomes a north korea-like state, where the government slowly restricts citizens' access to outside information. Currently my favorite "event" that I've written out take place after the regime has been in charge for over a century. Everyone in the country believes Novacotia to be at the pinnacle of technology, and safer than any other place on the mecropolis. The government feeds them propaganda, but no one knows what propaganda is, so to them it's taken as fact and nothing else. In reality, Novacotia lies between two superpowers (on the scale of the US and the USSR, or the US and China) who are in a cold war with each other. Neither feels it could successfully invade Novacotia without inciting war with the other superpower, so the Novacs are trapped in their synthesized reality. For the character that story arc follows, the reality is shattered when she is led out of the country by some smugglers and introduced to a nomadic group who lives near the deserted border of a superpower. They worship music and consider drug use to be a spiritual activity. Once a season (four times a year), there's a massive concert where musicians, dancers, and composers are hooked up to a neural interface which allows them to play music strictly by imagining it. She's introduced to this technology which she finds completely inconceivable (much in the same way a north korean refugee might view, say, an iPad), and her reality is broken. She brings these revelations back to her people, and starts the ball turning on the country-wide revolution. After the revolution begins, the superpower from the south decides it's a perfect time to intervene under the guise of a humanitarian effort. It swiftly beats the living snot out of the current government, but before it can sweep through the entire territory, the northern superpower launches a warp missile (think nukes, but instead of a big explosion, there's a massive implosion, meaning no radiation spread) over Novacotia and begins a war with the south. Lacking a government and the middle of the country now a dividing line between the two power's occupying forces, the Novacs again settle into oppression, but this time being fully aware of it. After several years of the occupation, and the fighting front having cooled considerably with each country being happy of their stake on the valuable land, a small town with a northern military base discovers a old cache of weaponry, stored by the regime from before the coup over a hundred years before. As they contemplate using the weapons to revolt, the soldiers kill someone (still figure that part out) important in the town. A waitress, who had (unknowingly to everyone else) already discovered the weapons activates a old AA gun and turns it on the airships over the base. Taken off guard, she downs four of the seven before she is killed herself. The town rises up, word spreads of the weapons cache, and it's revealed that there are depots hidden across the entire country. After another revolution, bolstered by the rediscovery of the old technology allowing for cheap energy production, the Novacs finally push both superpowers out of their country.